Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.

Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Ursula K. Le Guin on Redeeming the Imagination from the Commodification of Creativity and How Storytelling Teaches Us to Assemble Ourselves

“Literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“The imagination,” wrote the trailblazing philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in a 1794 letter, “is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.” And yet somehow, in the centuries since, we have increasingly lost sight of the imagination’s rapturous rewards and come to see it as a commodity of what we now call “the creative industry” — something calculable and efficient, useful in maximizing society’s comforts and business’s profits. Much as today’s archetypal Silicon Valley characters are pragmatizing Eastern philosophy and ancient meditation practices as tools for “optimizing” their “performance,” the imagination — that pinnacle of our cognitive evolution and seedbed of our core humanity — is being co-opted for purposes that have little to do with animating our sympathies and expanding our hearts.

In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.

I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination.

Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.

Le Guin observes that like any tool, the imagination requires that we first learn how to use it — or, rather, that we unlearn how to squander it. Storytelling, she argues, is the sandbox in which we learn to use the imagination:

Children have imagination to start with, as they have body, intellect, the capacity for language: things essential to their humanity, things they need to learn how to use, how to use well. Such teaching, training, and practice should begin in infancy and go on throughout life. Young human beings need exercises in imagination as they need exercise in all the basic skills of life, bodily and mental: for growth, for health, for competence, for joy. This need continues as long as the mind is alive.

When children are taught to hear and learn the central literature of their people, or, in literate cultures, to read and understand it, their imagination is getting a very large part of the exercise it needs.

Nothing else does quite as much for most people, not even the other arts. We are a wordy species. Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. Music, dance, visual arts, crafts of all kinds, all are central to human development and well-being, and no art or skill is ever useless learning; but to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and story.

Virginia Woolf considered memory the seamstress that threads our lives together, but it is story — our inner storytelling — that orders memory into a coherent thread; it is story that, as Susan Sontag memorably observed, can “reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.” Our life-paths are paved with story — stretching back, the stories we tell ourselves about what happened to us, why it did, and how it made us who we are; stretching forward, the stories we tell ourselves about what is possible, what we want to achieve, and who we want to become.

Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of their people.

[…]

A child who doesn’t know where the center is — where home is, what home is — that child is in a very bad way.

Home isn’t Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud. Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary.

Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.

But that self-invention, Le Guin cautions, is not a solitary act — it takes place at the communal campfire where our essential stories of being are co-created and told. Building on the ideas in her exquisite earlier meditation on telling and listening, she writes:

Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.

[…]

Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.

What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.

Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.

NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.

I am Christopher Tower the gmr

I am Christopher Tower (or Chris), and I am a writer of stuff. I live in Michigan. I play Ultimate, ride a bike, and supposedly educate college persons while myself being educated in college. I am married with two kids, a beagle, a curly lab, and a grouchy black cat. I like sushi. I love all SF, fantasy, comic books, D&D, board games, and Gnosticism. I am a Jungian. I am currently studying computer science at WMU.

EFF

Satchel

SENSE OF DOUBT STATUS AS OF 0705.04 - 16:45

Sense of Doubt is not currently dedicated to any themes or special interest. The subject matter is mine and may range from comic books to ultimate or from Baseball to feminist-centered media criticism. Until I feel I have enough content for multiple blogs, or until I am seized with a desire to create multiple blogs, this is it, and appropriately so. "Sense of Doubt" came about in Bowie’s Berlin period and the dark, ambient collaborations with Brian Eno. Like the Bowie of 1978, I have my own darkness that steals over me and through me, infecting everything. At the risk of sounding far too melodramatically obsessed with my own self-flagellations, this blog dedicates itself to that darkness, that infection. But it’s fun, too. Hey, I can be amusing? Or not. It’s the way of the [w]rench. Neurosis compelling action in insecure double-checking and misunderstanding evasions. It is my way.

More from the original description text that needed editing in 2015: Furthermore, Sense of Doubt is dedicated to the random. The theme is no theme. Just questions, doubt, and uncertainty. Feel the power of not knowing the answer. So dedicated on the last day of July 2006 by the Galactic Monkey Wrench.

The Blog about my job

It's about how my identity was taken from me by the powers that think they be, an identity, a job, I held for ten years. Go there if curious.

the galactic monkey wrench

The Galactic Monkey Wrench

This is the logo of the Galactic Monkey Wrench. I was given the nickname Galactic Monkey Wrench in college by a friend of mine who felt that I threw the monkey wrench into the cosmos at every available opportunity. Later, in discussions with my best friend, who isthe Lord of Chaos (the Loc), he asked for my title and when I told him, without thinking, he blurted out "the gmr!" Since this was random and we appreciate randomness, I became the gmr, even though technically I should be the gmw. But gmw sounds like a car or some industrial manufacturing firm that makes a strange widget of which one has never heard.
This acronym fetish may make no sense to anyone else, but my friend and I are quite driven to provide acronyms for many things. At the very least, it allows us to keep our conversations obscure and often private as no one knows about what we're talking.

Sense of Doubt Rare video

the gmrstudios repository of doubt

Christopher Tower's Facebook Posts

Monkey Wrench Books

This book is a little slower than the others. But if you become invested in this series, it provides key information about the history of Westeros and the lands across the Narrow Sea. It may not contain chapters with my favorite characters ...

Do I really need to review this book? It's one of the best books I have ever read. Martin is a great writer. All the books are great, and I am loving my time rereading them. If you have not checked out these books, start here and get ready ...

These books are immensely entertaining. Treat yourself to some strong writing, great action, compelling characters, and a mix of metaphysics and theology. The ending of this third book, which is presumably the last, is anti-climactic and so...

This was a fun book. Not OSC's best but very good OSC nonetheless. The best thing about is the time travel, slowing, and speeding powers of the characters and how OSC engages the reader in discussion of causality and time paradox. For fans ...

This book came to me via my wife Liesel who discovered it and urged me to read it. Beautifully written with compelling characters and a sense of the magical (yet realistic, somewhat). Funny yet full of the pathos that marks a good if not gr...